About Jamie Lin Wilson
Jamie Lin Wilson has built a career on highlighting the details that most of us miss. Her songs tap into the poetic pieces of everyday life in a singularly familiar way, garnering comparisons to legendary writers including John Prine, Guy Clark and Emmylou Harris. Her rich character sketches narrate stories both close to her life at home with her family — she’s married to her college sweetheart and a mom to four kids — as well as what she’s observed in her time spent on the road.
Rolling Stone Country notes that Jamie “sings with warmth and precision, telling stories of how to see the light when everything feels grey, or how to keep going when the road seems hopelessly long,” as evidenced on both of her critically-acclaimed full-length albums, 2018’s Jumping Over Rocks, and 2016’s and Holidays & Wedding Rings. She’s become a sought-after collaborator in her home state of Texas and beyond, adding harmonies to projects from American Aquarium, Jack Ingram, Turnpike Troubadours and Mike & the Moonpies, as well as a long list of others.
Before striking out on her solo career, Jamie fronted beloved bands the Gougers and the Trishas. She’s played stages at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Kerrville Folk Festival, AmericanaFest, Mile 0, Medicine Stone and the MusicFest, where she’s become a festival favorite for both her sets and what she adds to the stage when she sits in with friends. Her work has received praise from Billboard, No Depression, American Songwriter, among others.
In 2021 she’s releasing a set of covers — Mickey Newbury’s “T Total Tommy,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Ways to be Wicked” and Lyle Lovett’s “South Texas Girl” — recorded at Austin’s legendary Arlyn Studios. “I was looking for some inspiration, so I thought I’d take some outside songs into the studio to see if I could stretch my comfort zone a little,” she says. "I’ve always loved putting a fresh perspective and voice on other people’s words, and I hope I’ve done that here."
Courtney Patton:
To know Courtney Patton is to know that she can do anything and everything. Patton is a mother, a wife, a producer, a singer, a songwriter, and a musician. When the Covid world as we know it stopped concerts in their tracks in early 2020, Patton and her husband, fellow troubadour, Jason Eady, kept the heart of live music alive with a weekly program called Sequestered Songwriters. It included so many of their dearest musical friends, from Suzy Bogguss to Cody Jinks. The shows were themed in a way to honor influential artists and songwriters. It was over the course of this year, with weekly and always-beautiful dedications to the likes of Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor, Vince Gill, Eagles and Don Williams, that Patton- perhaps consciously, perhaps subconsciously- had her songwriter craft and musical tastes both sharpened and broadened. The result on Electrostatic is clear. Compared to previous more stripped-down projects, this new album has more depth musically without losing any of the of the highly personal and open-book songwriting that she’s become so loved for. It feels more soulful, more full than previous projects. In spots it feels jazzier, and on one track, even draws on Spanish influences to create an incredibly rich tapestry of sound to go with lyrics that are armed with sensitivity and sentiment. It’s as if she’s internalized the influences of her own musical heroes and manifested it into her own autobiographical dedication to music itself. Says Patton on the project, “I didn’t initially start the project with this intent, but as we were making it, I could hear all of my musical heroes and influences organically coming out in each song. And that brought me so much joy.”
The new project follows a wild two years of her own personal deep dive into the back catalogs of nearly every single artist she ever loved, not just listening and hearing the lyrical idiosyncrasies and chord progressions, but actually spending hours upon hours learning how they were played. Studying why they connected with her emotionally. Investigating how they were delivered and what made them so meaningful. Patton became a deeper student of music. And it shows on and through this new project. The lyrics themselves are as personal as anything that Patton has recorded before, however. Nowhere is this truer than with the title track, a dedication to her sister whom she lost in a vehicle accident nearly two decades ago. The song is a tribute to the influence that still exudes from those that have passed away. Patton says, “It’s a song about finding the beauty still around us in the memories of those that we’ve loved and lost. If energy can’t be created or destroyed, then we can see and feel them all around us every day. Beauty from ashes. There’s something comforting about that in itself.”
Every piece of the new project has Patton’s fingerprints and influence on it. She co-produced the project with both her husband and the Band of Heathens’ Gordy Quist. Musicians on her latest project include a group of all-star musical talents such as Geoff Queen (Kelly Willis, Bruce Robison, Reckless Kelly) on guitar and pedal steel, Trevor Nealon (Jerry Jeff Walker, Rodney Crowell, Jack Ingram) on piano and keyboards, Heather Stalling (Max Stalling, Johnny Lee, The Old 97s) on fiddle, Richard Millsap (Ray Wylie Hubbard, George Strait, John Fogerty) on drums, Naj Conklin (Guy Forsyth, Jon Dee Graham, Jason Eady) on bass, and half of the acclaimed band The Trishas on backing vocals in Jamie Lin Wilson and Kelley Mickwee. Each bring their own unique influences to the project as well.
The project follows previous solo albums, Triggering a Flood (2013), So This Is Life (2015), her acoustic collaborative project with her husband Jason Eady, Something Together, (2017), and Billboard charting project, What It’s Like To Fly Alone (2018).
